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What are you reading?

I am in a school mode and I had to share my pain of having to read Aristotle&#39;s Poetics. Boooooo!!!
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Also a bunch of short essays by Orwell, which are quite good, especially &quot;Politics and the English Language.&quot; If you ever want to know how to dissect the language of propaganda, it&#39;s a really excellent essay, readily avialable on the internet.
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Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

Re: What are you reading?

On a similar note, Fuuma, I&#39;m reading &quot;Contingency, Irony, Solidarity&quot; by Richard Rorty.It&#39;s the second time I&#39;ve read it through but the first time I&#39;ve understood what he&#39;s talking about, I think.It&#39;s worth making the effort to read it carefully because Rorty&#39;s ideas are motivated by heartfelt disgust at cruelty and injustice.</p>

Re: What are you reading?

[quote user=&quot;dontbecruel&quot;]

On a similar note, Fuuma, I&#39;m reading &quot;Contingency, Irony, Solidarity&quot; by Richard Rorty.It&#39;s the second time I&#39;ve read it through but the first time I&#39;ve understood what he&#39;s talking about, I think.It&#39;s worth making the effort to read it carefully because Rorty&#39;s ideas are motivated by heartfelt disgust at cruelty and injustice.</p>

[/quote]</p>

Rorty is great. I read the part of the book that deals with irony, he&#39;s really smart.</p>

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

Re: What are you reading?

[quote user=&quot;Faust&quot;]Rorty is great. I read the part of the book that deals with irony, he&#39;s really smart.[/quote]</p>

Not much appreciated in England I don&#39;t think, but his books seem to be very widely read by humanities undergrads in the states. What do you study Faust?</p>

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Yes, he&#39;s a humanities hero, since he basically wrote that best philosophy is found in literature. Philosophy people really hate him for that, lol. He teaches at Stanford now. Strange that he&#39;s not appreciated in England, since he wrote extensively on continental philosophy. Well, come to think of it, maybe not so strange [:P]</p>

I am in process of getting my Master&#39;s in Liberal Studies, concentrating in literature.</p>

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

Re: What are you reading?

In the UK, philosophy departments teach analytic philosophy and ignore continental thinkerswhile every other humanities department has its students writingquasi-philosophical essays on Foucault and Derrida.I imagine the same is true in the states isn&#39;t it?</p>

I think Rorty is too sceptical about Foucault to be very popular over here. University lecturers in literature love Foucault because he allows them to imagine themselves as political without actually having to get off their arses and be kind to their fellow human beings.</p>

Re: What are you reading?

[quote user=&quot;dontbecruel&quot;]

In the UK, philosophy departments teach analytic philosophy and ignore continental thinkerswhile every other humanities department has its students writingquasi-philosophical essays on Foucault and Derrida.I imagine the same is true in the states isn&#39;t it?</p>

I think Rorty is too sceptical about Foucault to be very popular over here. University lecturers in literature love Foucault because he allows them to imagine themselves as political without actually having to get off their arses and be kind to their fellow human beings.</p>

[/quote]</p>

It&#39;s hard to comment for me, because I haven&#39;t read Rorty extensively, but I believe you. I should&#39;ve taken Foucault class last semester, but I am too immersed in Lit. What are you studying (or is this reading for pleasure)?
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Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

Re: What are you reading?

I did my first degree in English Lit but that was quite a few years ago, so I amreading for pleasure I guess. I&#39;m now back at college studying medicine (9 monthsto go). I think I read things like the Rorty to keep alive my cherished self-image as a cultured person. In reality, of course, my brain is turning to jelly.

Re: What are you reading?

[quote user=&quot;new_dawn_fades&quot;]

for the third time The wind up bird chronicle - Haruki Murakami

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I did not get through it for some reason. Well, I ran out of time, my semester started, but I also kind of lost interest. I liked the Wild Sheep Chase, and Norwegian Wood, but this one for some reason did not seem as interesting.
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Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

Re: What are you reading?

Anybody read Les bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell, critics have been raving about this so much I guess I&#39;ll have to check it out, just to be able to sustain conversations. I just find stories involving gay nazis (I know I&#39;m reducing a 900 pages book to a cliche, please forgive me :) )so tired since Moravia perfectly summed up the question in The comformist.

Re: What are you reading?

[quote user=&quot;tweedlesinpink&quot;]

dontbecruel, that is indeed crisply structured - i&#39;ve always marvelled at the bard&#39;s sense of structure, diction and lyricism in his writing. every now and then i return to shakespeare and i feel something like a sense of regeneration when i&#39;ve read one of his plays, whether it&#39;s something i&#39;ve already read or something i&#39;m looking at for the first time.</p>

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i&#39;m currently on kerouac&#39;s on the road - the choice of reading matter is almost cliched, i know, but i&#39;ve been meaning to read kerouac for a long time without getting down to it, so here i am.
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Welcome, it&#39;s nice to see you here (didn&#39;t mean to be rude by deleting your post #1 [:D]). I liked On the Road. It seemed honest (a strange thing to say about a novel, I know), and unpretencious. It&#39;s no literary masterpiece, but it&#39;s great for what it is, a description of those who chose not to participate in the society they did not like. There was one incredible passage from it that hung long on my fridge door (it&#39;s been since replaced by pictures of my daughter, but c&#39;est la vie). If I find it, I&#39;ll post it here.
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Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

Re: What are you reading?

i think a honest novel&#39;s not a strange thing to say at all! plenty of novels don&#39;t immediately strike one as being honest - make that plenty of modern novels.</p>

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this is a passage that leaped out at me when i read the first bits of the book, and i think it&#39;s wonderful:</p>

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<span lang="EN-GB">&ldquo;...I shambled after as I&#39;ve been doing all
my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the
mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous
of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace
thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like
spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and
everybody goes &lsquo;Awww!&rsquo;&quot;</span></p>

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<span lang="EN-GB">would you consider kerouac (and the beat generation) merely an older generation of what would today be termed popular literature?</span>

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No, I would say that it was the only genuine generation of people who refused to participate in the society they despised - every other group, starting with the hippies (Celestial Seasonings Tea, anyone?), and then punks, rockers, and rappers has been commercialized and sold. Capitalism hasn&#39;t caught on to making a product out of rebellion back then. I daresay these guys lived truly fulfilling lives that today has become so much harder to do. There is no more Bohemia - it is dead.
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Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde